Interesting excerpt about Nintendo's inability to meet consumer demand for the Wii console, full article here: Can The Wii Save Your Life?. The article also states that Nintendo has sold more than 10 million consoles in 8 months.

Q. Is the limited supply of Wiis at retail a sign that Nintendo is artificially restricting the number of units, or is this all that Nintendo's manufacturing process can bear? Is this a strategy?

A. This is the limit of our production right now. Since our business of selling hardware is not flat over the year--it goes way up around the holidays--we try to strike a balance with our parts suppliers. They'd rather have to make the same number of parts each month. Our total inventory is only 2 1/2 weeks worth of supply. A normal supply would be six weeks. Right now we're living hand to mouth, and it's not clear that we're going to get on top of that in time for the holidays.

They wrapped a small, 5-inch wide cylinder in a special metal mesh (the cloak), and then fired microwaves and observed that the waves were transferred around the object in a way that concealed the object's existence.

It's only 2-dimensional for now, 3-dimensional cloaking is believed possible but more difficult. And it's only functional for microwaves, not visible light (another hurdle). Still, it's all very cool.

Full article at National Geographic: First Invisibility Cloak Tested Successfully

For many years I've been critical of the education system in this country. The shortcomings and deficiencies seem obvious. The goals of education are good - to learn, to grow, to broaden our minds. But learning, growing and mind-broadening usually do not happen if you're forced. On the contrary, it's a normal part of human nature to rebel and turn away when forced, rather than being pulled further in. It's curious that our schools and education system don't recognize this, opting to force-feed material that most students could not be any less interested in learning. How many adults reading this remember anything specific from their high school math classes, or the facts and details about most historical events? It takes very little energy to show that most adults (and even the kids still in school) do not retain much of anything that they "learned" in school. I wish I could cite the study that stated the average U.S. adult did not know enough basic math to balance a checkbook. That's pretty shocking; we're talking about addition and subtraction!

So what kind of learning, growing and mind-broadening are we accomplishing? It seems plainly clear that schools do not help you learn, but instead teach you how to memorize, how to follow rules, and how to conform.

In Students Say High Schools Let Them Down, more than 10,000 high school students were questioned about education. The results make a compelling statement about the worth (or worthlessness) of public education in the United States.

What kinds of things did these 10,378 teenages say?

• they said they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting
  
• they do not believe their school has done a good job of challenging them academically or preparing them for college.
  
• their senior year would be more meaningful if they could take courses related to the jobs they wanted
  
• many students said they felt their schools did not do a good job teaching them how to think critically or analyze problems
  
• of the 11% who dropped out of high school (or are considering it), only 1 in 9 said it was because "school work too hard". The greatest percentage of dropouts (36%) said they were "not learning anything", and 24% said, "I hate my school"
  

If all of this is true, it brings up the obvious question, "How do you fix it?" I'm with John Taylor Gatto - it's not fixable. The entire education system is beyond repair, and all of the energy/time/money/politics is just a waste.

Scrap it and start over.

This is a pretty interesting read...

From Men's faces show paternal potential

Men's faces can reveal their interest in having children, according to psychologists who claim women subconsciously pick up on the subtle cues when choosing a partner. In a controversial study, researchers used photographs of men who had been quizzed on their fondness for children, to see if women could identify those more likely to want a family. The researchers found that not only were women often able to rank men by their fondness for children, but those who appeared more keen on kids were rated as more attractive prospects for long-term relationships.

Malcom Gladwell -- not just some random guy, but a respected author/writer -- just weighed in on the Harvard student plagiarism issue. It's been in the news again and again, and I've wondered what the big deal is. In Viswanathan-gate, Gladwell does a great job of putting things in perspective.

Let me get this straight. Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarizes a series of passages from Megan McCafferty's teen novels  "Sloppy Seconds" and "Second Helpings" for her debut novel: "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." After the story breaks, McCafferty's publisher starts huffing and puffing and threatening legal action, Viswanathan apologizes and goes on the Today show, her publisher Little Brown (which is incidentally my publisher too) withdraws her book from the market, Harvard launches an "investigation" and Viswanathan gets pummeled by a hundred angry columnists, pundits and bloggers.

Can someone tell me why? This is teen-literature. It's genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before.

[Read the remainder of his article here]

Complete with screenshots and a good amount of detail, Paul Thurrott discusses the latest test version of Windows Vista in Windows Vista February 2006 CTP (Build 5308/5342) Review, Part 5: Where Vista Fails. Having recently written about Vista myself, I was interested to see what he had to say.

He seems like a bit of a Microsoft fanboy, which makes it hit harder as he goes on to explain in detail why Microsoft "failed with Vista". In the end, he summarizes Vista as "a few major changes and many subtle or minor updates".

Ouch.

In What pit bulls can teach us about profiling, Malcolm Gladwell discusses profiling, and how easy it is to make sloppy, useless generalizations.

Another great article by Malcolm Gladwell, The social logic of Ivy League admissions. I first read this in the New Yorker several months ago, and I'm very pleased to see it freely available on the internet.

I just read Malcom Gladwell's Thoughts on Freakonomics, which you'll find interesting if you read Freakonomics.

I just found an interview with Stacy Peralta (Stacy Peralta Riding Giants Sundance Surfer). It's from 2004, right around when Riding Giants was coming out. I totally dig Stacy's movies. I can remember where I was when I first saw The Bones Brigade Video Show in the early 80s, and also The Search for Animal Chin. His films have come a long way since then, but they're all great. Much more enjoyable than most bullshit movies coming out of Hollywood.

As a somewhat related side story... I was driving around Los Angeles back in like 1994, trying to find something but ended up totally lost. We were going to a dinner party or something. After lots of "where the hell are we?", I said, "the next place we see, I'm pulling over to ask for directions". As it turns out, it was the Pink Motel that I knew from years earlier in Animal Chin. I was thinking, "could this be the same Pink Motel? Did it have the famous pool that the Bones Brigade skated?" I went to the main window and rang the buzzer, and in about two seconds I was floored to see the big, white pompador of Monty appear behind the glass. It was the same Pink Motel, and the pool was still there, and Monty was super cool. He talked with me for a little while, gave me directions to get where I needed to go, and left me happy with a tiny little connection to one of my favorite movies.

This isn't really much of a suprise. In fact, I think it's an expected outcome. A study from Brown University found that 80% of the black population and 50% of the white population will not return to New Orleans (Study Says 80% of New Orleans Blacks May Not Return).

The prehurricane population of the entire city was 484,000, and if these numbers are correct that would put the new New Orleans population at 140,000. They found various reasons for former citizens not returning, including ruined neighborhoods, relocation costs to move back, or the simple fact that they've already begun putting down roots in other cities. So what's gonna happen to New Orleans? What will the city be like a year from now?

One of my co-workers just wrote an article for Java Developer's Journal, "Java Is Dead, Long Live Java!" - The Future of Java. Hey Bryan, when you're big and famous, don't forget the little people. :)

It seems that lately lots of writers have been bashing Java. Some people seem to think that Java has stagnated, and that the "hyper-enthusiasts" have left. Well, the rest of us are just quietly coding on a platform that is more exciting than ever.

I think this explains why I like to stay up late at night, and usually get very little done in the morning.

A person's thinking ability may be better after being awake for 24 hours or being drunk than it is following a good night's sleep, a study suggests. A University of Colorado team found understanding and short-term memory were worse in the minutes after waking.

Mental skills 'worse after sleep'

Found this at NPR a while back, still haven't listened to it. Seems pretty interesting though. Malcom Gladwell talks about some of this stuff (and a whole lot else) in Blink, so I'm curious to learn more.

Psychologists have identified four key problems that lead to divorce: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. And the worst of these? Contempt for a partner. But identifying the root cause of a problem in a marriage is only half the battle.

'The Four Horsemen': Why Marriages Fail

From this article: Wal-Mart is labelled 'bad for US'

Retail giant Wal-Mart is "bad for America", according to a poll carried out on behalf of a group campaigning against the store.

The poll, conducted by Zogby for a union-led group called WakeUpWalMart, asked 1,012 people across the US about their attitudes to Wal-Mart.

Of the respondents, 59% said they agreed with the statement that "Wal-Mart is bad for America".

Read the rest of the article

From this slashdot post: Sony DRM Installed Even When EULA Declined

Imagine if you order a box of catfood to be delivered that's worth about $10. And then the next day a crowd of 15 attorneys in suits arrive at your door with a 20 page contract, and the box. They won't give you the catfood until you agree to their "license." You can either call your own attorneys, if you have any, and spend several weeks evaluating their contract at the cost of several thousand dollars of your own money, or, they say, you can simply agree to the contract by blinking your eyes.

It turns out that there were worms in the catfood and now your cat is incredibly sick. Amazingly, the attorneys did this on purpose. If you take her to the vet, it will cost you hundreds of dollars to cure her. You don't remember blinking, but they swear you did.

The government has sent an angry letter to the catfood guys, but no one looks like they have any intention of paying your vet bill - or even sending your cat a get well card.

In response to the government, the catfood people announce they've "solved" the problem, because they've agreed to temporarily stop shipping worms in catfood. However, they're still shipping spiders, ants, and leeches - and they have "big plans" to expand the practice.

You don't know exactly how long your cat has left to live, but after watching all this, you get the feeling its days are numbered one way or another.

Damian Kulash is not the first person to say that music copy protection software is a bad thing. The recent blow-up of Sony BMG's copy protection software (that exposes your personal computer to serious security threats and viruses) highlights this. But the record companies have tried to prevent CD copying for years. The argument is that digital file-sharing ruins the CD market, and everyone involved (artists, record company, music stores, etc.) all lose money.

It's much better to have copies of albums on lots of iPods, even if only half of them have been paid for, than to have a few CD's sitting on a shelf and not being played.

So what's different about Damian? It's this: he's the lead singer for Ok Go, famous for the video A Million Ways. He's not an industry analyst, or music critic, or a random guy. He's a musician whose livelihood depends on the success of his band.

He understands that the first step is buying an album, then you listen to it a whole lot, then you like it so much that you share it with your pals, who may or may not buy their own copy. But if you throw copy protection software in there, it breaks the 2nd step: you might not be able to listen to it yourself, or maybe not in the manner you like (for instance, on your computer, or even on a regular CD player). So you miss out on getting traction with the first listener, and never even make it to the second listener.

Read Damian's entire article here: Buy, Play, Trade, Repeat

Polar bears normally swim across the open sea between ice floes in order to find food. With global temperatures on the rise and pack ice receding, more bears are being forced into long-distance swimming. While the bears are adapted to open ocean swimming, it appears the required distances are increasing faster than their distance capabilities. So a bunch of them are drowning before they make it onto solid ground, and the drowning rate is increasing. Sad news for polar bears.

From Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts:

Scientists have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.

The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.

Although polar bears are strong swimmers, they are adapted for swimming close to the shore. Their sea journeys leave them them vulnerable to exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by waves.

According to the new research, four bear carcases were found floating in one month in a single patch of sea off the north coast of Alaska, where average summer temperatures have increased by 2-3C degrees since 1950s.

The scientists believe such drownings are becoming widespread across the Arctic, an inevitable consequence of the doubling in the past 20 years of the proportion of polar bears having to swim in open seas.

....

Read the rest of the article here

Wikipedia content has been criticised many times over the years for allowing errors or hoaxes to slip through. I've argued about this before, saying that while Wikipedia content is generally excellent, it should not be relied upon as a sole information source. As a communally edited information source, it is an inevitability that some of the information might be incorrect, even if it's only for a brief period of time.

So what does this say about the accuracy of Wikipedia article content as a whole? Does the occassional existence of a factless article tell us anything about the accuracy of the other articles, of which there are almost 4 million? Experience using wikipedia tells us that the content is both accurate and informative, but an expert-led investigation by Nature did some real work to show that a sampling of Wikipedia articles contained approximately the same number of inaccuracies as equivalent articles in Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Interesting article on how women carry on after having a miscarriage versus an abortion. Their findings show that women who miscarry are more distressed initially, but it clears up over the long-term. In women who have abortions, their initial distress is less, but it lasts up to 5 years. This makes sense: abortion is a chosen path, and a woman may be sad or upset with that decision for a long time. But a miscarriage is generally not controllable, so while it can be extremely upsetting in the short-term, it is possible to heal and move on.

From Anguish of abortion is worse than miscarriage:

A study in Norway compared a group of 40 women who had suffered a miscarriage with 80 women who had an abortion, questioning them 10 days, six months, two years and five years after the event. Although women who had a miscarriage suffered more mental distress up to six months after losing their baby, women who had an abortion experienced more mental distress at the two- and five-year intervals.

Researchers recently found more wreckage from Titanic that shows it broke into 3 pieces, not 2, which shows that the ship sank much faster than previously thought. More info here: Titanic pieces located.

The discovery of two large pieces of the Titanic's hull on the ocean floor has changed the story of its final minutes, indicating the ocean liner's end was more quick and terrifying than previously thought, underwater researchers said yesterday. The hull pieces were a crucial part of the ship's structure and make up a bottom section that was missing when the wreck was first located in 1985, they said. After these key sections of the hull broke free, the bow and stern spilt, said Roger Long, a naval architect who analyzed the find. The stern, which was still buoyant and filled with survivors, likely plunged toward the ocean floor about five minutes later, giving passengers less time to escape than widely believed.

Unfortunately, the rules for labeling food as "organic" are at risk. The organic food market is one of the strongest growing industries around for the simple fact that more and more people are sick of eating fabricated, processed food products that taste like shit.

If the corporate mega-monsters and their puppets in the U.S. Government have their way, food producers will be able to use chemicals and other artificial ingredients and still claim that the food is "organic". For consumers, that pretty much sucks. The whole point of buying and eating organic food is to avoid eating chemicals and other artificial bullshit that is not food.

It's infuriating that Kraft, General Mills, and the other corporate giants who are behind the Organic Trade Association are trying to change the law so that they can continue selling their fake-food bullshit to people who explicitly do not want to buy it. The "Organic Trade Association" is nothing more than a corporation-run lobbyist group that would be more appropriately named "A Bunch of Corporate Assholes Who Will Do Whatever the Hell They Want, Whether You Like It or Not".

Excerpts taken from What is Organic? Powerful Players Want a Say:

Last week, Senate and House Republicans on the Agriculture appropriations subcommittee inserted a last-minute provision into the department's fiscal 2006 budget specifying that certain artificial ingredients could be used in organic food.

The Organic Trade Association, an industry lobbying group that proposed the amendment and spent several months pushing for its adoption, says that the measure will encourage the continued growth of organic food.

While reading about computer interaction and design, I found Interaction Design which has a good collection of articles.

snipped from Coffee a good source of antioxidants:

Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee emerged as the biggest source of antioxidants [in the typical U.S. diet], given that Americans do not eat sufficient quantities of fruit and vegetables. Black tea came second, followed by bananas, dry beans and corn.

Helping to rid the body of free radicals, destructive molecules that damage cells and DNA, antioxidants have been linked to a number of benefits, including protection against heart disease and cancer.

The research is the latest in a number of studies to suggest coffee could be beneficial, with consumption linked to a reduced risk of liver and colon cancer, type two diabetes, and Parkinson's disease.

Microsoft has a well-established history of producing buggy products that miss their release dates. It's an easy joke to make: Microsoft usually takes at least 3 major versions before they produce what should have been "version 1.0". But that's all changing with the work to build Windows Vista (aka Longhorn). Battling Google, Microsoft Changes How It Builds Software talks about what went on behind the scenes to change the way they build software products in Redmond.

I happily left Windows for Mac OS X more than 3 years ago, and I have absolutely no intention of ever, ever going back. But I'm looking forward to the eventual release of Windows Vista (in 2006? 2007? even later than that?), where we'll be able to see if they pulled it off.

This is cool, it's called LifeStraw. It's basically a small tube that people in third world countries can use to drink from any water source. It's still a prototype, but seems like a super good idea that has the potential to save literally millions of lives around the world.

More information here.

Scientists at the University of Maryland think that large quantities of artificial meat could be produced to supply the world with animal-free meat products, like chickenless nuggets. This is based on experiments for NASA, that created small amounts of muscle fibre cultured from single cells. According to the researchers, larger quantities could be grown in thin sheets and then stacked up to create thickness. Of course, they need to figure out a way to exercise it to make it taste like regular meat.

This has been in the news several times over the past few years as different groups make progress toward growing muscle tissue in a science lab. It would be good to grow meat without the time and expense of raising real animals, but for every supporter of lab-grown science meat, I can find someone else who would never be comfortable eating a science project. Ultimately though, I think most people in the U.S. are fairly indiscriminate about the food they eat, so I tend to think most people wouldn't care.

But the meat industry - and more specifically, cattle - produce almost all of the leather that makes its way onto shoes, jackets, couches, wallets, purses, belts, etc. If hoof-grown meat is replaced by lab-grown meat, that will have serious consequences for several other industries (unless, of course, they figure out how to make lab-grown leather).

Full article here: Artificial Meat Could Be Grown on a Large Scale.

Scientists in Italy first discovered that humans produce a unique by-product as a result of cocaine usage. Next, they found that unique chemical in river water, benzoylecgonine, and doing the math they figured out that there was enough of it to suggest 40,000 snorts of coke each day in one particular area of Italy.

Wired article here: Rivers of Coke. BBC news wrote this: Italian river 'full of cocaine'.

Scientists have found large quantities of a cocaine by-product in a river in northern Italy - suggesting consumption is much higher than previously thought. The River Po was found to be carrying the equivalent of nearly 4kg (8.8lb) of cocaine daily. The Po Valley is home to about five million people. The study estimated daily consumption to be about 27 doses (100mg or 0.004oz each) per 1,000 young adults. The study was published by the web journal Environmental Health. The chemical tested - benzoylecgonine (BE) - had arrived via the sewage system from the urine of drug users. A by-product of cocaine metabolism, it cannot be produced by other means. The estimated daily consumption "greatly exceeds official national figures," the report says.

...read the rest of the BBC article here...

CNet posted their top 10 dot-com flops, but missing from the list: Agillion, my ex-dot-com. How could they include Kibu.com at number 9, which supposedly raised a mere $22 million (and didn't even spend it all!), but pass on including Agillion? We raised (and completely squandered) way more than $22 million, and had almost no customers at all. In the end, Agillion left an empty bank account and something like $20 million in debt.

I hope the Agillion marketing clowns stole some of the cash, seriously, because if they really blew $40+ million on marketing alone, then that's just a sad, sad reflection on their ability to market anything.

1. Webvan
2. Pets.com
3. Kozmo.com
4. Flooz.com
5. eToys.com
6. Boo.com
7. MVP.com
8. Go.com
9. Kibu.com
10. GovWorks.com

This is totally dumb, on so many levels. Are Christians really concerned about morality and the impact on morality from video games? Um, isn't it also important that a damn good number of the bible-thumping Christians are out running around lying, cheating, adultering, divorcing, ruining families, etc. My first thought is, "why is everyone so quick to blame video games?", but then I stop myself because the answer is kinda obvious: those people are unwilling to accept the responsibility of being good parents to their children, so instead they shift blame onto anything within reach. And the poor kids... I feel bad for the sad lot who will be subjected to morality-based Christian video games... man that's gonna suck.

I wonder if the new Christian games will showcase holy wars where you get to slaughter thousands of innocent foreigners because they look different, have different opinions or beliefs from your video game character. That would certainly be in line with Christian history. Oh shit! They can't do that, because then it would be just like all of the other hugely popular violent video games where you get to kill people, and they're trying so hard not to be like them. Oh well.

Christians Code Heavenly Games.

Cats don't like sweet foods because they can't taste them. Sweet taste is meaningless to them. Who knew? Why cats don't go for sweet foods

After the recent bombing in Madrid, a letter was sent to several newspapers from a terrorist group claiming responsibility (see "'Al-Qaeda' warns of more attacks"). Among other things, they wrote the following, directed at George Bush himself (emphasis added in the interesting, poignant parts):

A word for the foolish Bush.

We know that you live in the worst days of your life in fear of death squads which spoilt your world and we are very keen that you do not lose in the forthcoming elections as we know very well that any big attack can bring down your government and this is what we do not want.

We cannot get anyone who is more foolish than you, who uses force instead of wisdom and diplomacy.

Your stupidity and religious extremism is what we want as our people will not awaken from their deep sleep except when there is an enemy.

So let's go over that last sentence again: "your [that's Bush, remember] stupidity and religious extremism is what we want". Well, way to go Bush! By being so easy for the rest of the world to hate, Bush makes it not only easy, but possible, for the terrorists to create an "us vs. them" mentality in terrorists' minds (in fact, Bush does a great job of creating an "us vs. them" rift on his own). So without Bush's help, terrorists wouldn't really be able to do anything cause nobody would rally behind them.

I've posted several articles and studies about cell phone usage that show the effects of talking on a phone while driving, but this one is a bit different. Unlike the U.S.-based studies, where most of the data and findings are based off of experiments and lab studies, this new one is based off of real life driving data and cell phone records. The results are absolutely consistent with all of the other studies (that show drivers are much shittier at driving when they're talking on a phone), but this one correlates the actual occurrences of accidents with cell phone records (something that isn't possible in the U.S. due to privacy laws).

I just went ahead and copied the whole article here, but the original is Hands-Free Cellphone Devices Don't Aid Road Safety, Study Concludes:

A study of Australian drivers found that those using cellphones were four times as likely to be involved in a serious crash regardless of whether they used hands-free devices like earpieces or speaker phones that have been perceived as making talking while driving safer.

The study, which is to appear in The British Medical Journal today, is the first of its kind to use actual crash data and cellphone records to show a link between talking on the phone and being seriously injured in an accident. It is also the first to conclude definitively outside of a laboratory setting that holding a phone to the ear or talking through a hands-free device pose the same risks.

Because cellphone records are not considered public information, a similar study has not been conducted in the United States. The most up-to-date research by the federal government has relied either on volunteers who were videotaped while driving or on experiments in which a driver was monitored by researchers in a laboratory.

The new study examined the cellphone records of 744 drivers who had accidents in Perth, Australia, where drivers are required to use hands-free devices. Researchers estimated the time of the crash and looked at whether the driver used a cellphone in the minutes leading up to the accident. They then examined similar time intervals in the days before the crash to calculate the increased risk of using the cellphone.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit research group in Virginia, sent researchers to three hospitals in Perth during a two-year period from 2002 to 2004 to interview crash victims. The researchers asked several questions, including whether the driver had a hands-free device in the car and how often the device was used. To avoid having drivers incriminate themselves, the researchers did not ask if a hands-free apparatus was in use at the time of the crash. Rather, they asked drivers how often they used such a device and factored that into determining the devices' effectiveness.

"There is no safety advantage associated with switching to the types of hands-free devices that are commonly in use," the study concludes.

With several states restricting the use of cellphones in cars, the findings raise questions about how useful those laws are. Currently, New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia require drivers to use a hands-free device. Beginning Oct. 1, Connecticut will also make holding a phone and driving illegal. But as the Australian research and other recent studies show, it is the act of talking, not holding a phone, that is the most distracting.

"There just doesn't seem to be any safety benefit by restricting drivers to hands-free phones," said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "It's the cognitive overload that sometimes occurs when you're engaging in a conversation that is the source of the distraction more so than the manipulation of the device."

A spokeswoman for the New York Department of Motor Vehicles said the department was conducting a study of the way cellphones affect driving and would report the findings to the Legislature before the end of the year. That report could include recommendations for additional restrictions on using cellphones while driving, the spokeswoman, Christine Burling, said.

The Australian study notes not only that cellphone laws are hard to enforce but that more restrictive measures there appear unlikely. "While a possible solution in the future is to change mobile phones so they cannot be used when vehicles are in motion," the Australian study said, "the likelihood the industry would embrace such a change seems remote."

Paul A. Green, a scientist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, said studies like this could exert influence on lawmakers. "They're most convinced by the tombstone count," he said.

Here's another reason to trust the U.S. Government.

About 100 years ago, the U.S. government passed a bill on "revenue to meet war expenditures" which would cover costs for the Spanish-American War (Repealing the Spanish-American War Telephone Tax). It was publicly stated as being a war tax, so everyone knew what was going on. But Representative Dingley wrote in 1898 that "all of these additional taxes are war taxes, which would be naturally repealed or modified when the necessitates of war and the payment of war expenses have ceased." So after the war was over, people should expect the Spanish-American War Tax to go away. Seems pretty clear.

It eventually did go away, but it took 100 years.

See? Our government leaders don't lie.

An interesting read with two scientists about what they feel are glaring holes in the science of Star Wars, full article here: The "Star Wars" Worlds: More Science Than Fiction?.

Everyone knows the Star Wars galaxy is located "far, far away." But how realistic are the alien worlds described in the science fiction saga?

To find out, National Geographic News checked in with two experts on everything extraterrestrial: Bruce Betts, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.

An Israeli inventor has created an apparatus that allows a diver to breath underwater without the use of a bulky air tank strapped to their back. It mimics the way fish breath underwater, which will allow a diver to remain below the surface for longer periods of time and eliminate the need to refill and carry huge scuba tanks. Full article here "Like a fish - Revolutionary Underwater Breathing System". Snippets here:

An Israeli Inventor has developed a breathing apparatus that will allow breathing underwater without the assistance of oxygen tanks. This new invention will use the relatively small amounts of air that already exist in water to supply oxygen to both scuba divers and submarines. The invention has already captured the interest of most major diving manufacturers as well as the Israeli Navy.

...

Bodner has already built and tested a laboratory model and he is on the path to building a full-scale prototype. Patents for the invention have already been granted in Europe and a similar one is currently pending examination in the U.S. Meetings have already been held with most major diving manufacturers as well as with the Israeli Navy. Initial financial support for the project has been given by Israel Ministry of Industry and Commerce and Bodner is currently looking for private investors to help complete his project.

If everything goes according to plan, in a few years the new tankless breathing system will be operational and will be attached to a diver in the form of a vest that will enable him to stay underwater for a period of many hours.

Medical researchers at CalTech and the Children's Hospital in Los Angeles have successfully inhibited cancer growth in mice by wrapping engineered RNA in nanomaterials and introducing them into the bloodstream. Two polymers and a special coating allow the therapeutic RNA to enter the cancer cell and release the therapeutic RNA payload. The new technique has slowed or prevented the development of secondary tumors in lab mice with Ewing's sarcoma. Further testing is planned on humans, and with other cancers.

Dell goes crazy hiring 10,000+ workers in India to staff call centers for US-based customers.

Dell's India staff will swell to more than 10,000 workers by year end, as the company fills out call center and software development roles. To hit the 10,000 mark, Dell will need to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 workers over the next 8 months, CEO Kevin Rollins told reporters in Bangalore, according to numerous media reports. Despite push-back from customers and some employees, Dell has been relentless about offshoring customer support work. It currently employs far more staffers outside of the US than at home. Should Dell hit the 10,000 mark, then its Indian operations would account for close to one-fifth of the company's total workforce.

In "Comments Are More Important Than Code", Jef Raskin rants about why self-documenting code doesn't really exist, and what makes comments useful and informative. He was super smart, and made some good points here.

Do not believe any programmer, manager, or salesperson who claims that code can be self-documenting or automatically documented. It ain't so. Good documentation includes background and decision information that cannot be derived from the code. It is hard to imagine any foreseeable software or robot that could collect this information from the people involved with a programming project - at the very least it must understand natural language, which is still the Holy Grail to the AI community.

An interesting twist on phishing scams, as seen on slashdot.

Two graduate students at Indiana University conducted a phishing study to determine how readily students will give up personal information if the phishing emails appear to come from close friends. Using only publicly available information, they sent out emails to students asking them to click a link that required username/password information. Needless to say, the study has generated lots of attention on campus. The student newspaper has the story and the researchers have created a blog where the participants can vent.

Ooooh, I love the Microsoft smack talk. The following taken from Paul Thurrott's WinHEC 2005 Blog:

I'm reflecting a bit on Longhorn 5048 [the most recent beta build of Microsoft's next operating system, code-named Longhorn]. My thoughts are not positive, not positive at all. This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves. This has the makings of a train wreck.

Gordon Moore says "Moore's Law is dead", although he clarifies that it won't really die for another 10 or 20 years.

From Wired News: Cloned Cows Yummy and Safe:

Cattle-cloning scientists at the University of Connecticut say milk and meat from cloned animals are safe for human consumption.

....

The researchers examined more than 100 meat-quality criteria, and found that 90 percent showed no noteworthy variations. About eight variables related to the amount of fat and fatty acids in the meat were significantly higher in the meat from the clones.

Scientific American published a huge article about spam mail and how to stop it ("Stopping Spam"). Not sure if the whole thing is worth reading, since I haven't read more than the first page, but maybe one day I'll finish reading the whole article.

"Return of the Mac", a cool read by Paul Graham..

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

Nice rant by Lawrence Lessig ("Why Your Broadband Sucks") about broadband. He argues that governments have established a precedent of providing services that were better or cheaper than the free market offerings. Street lamps, tollbooth workers, city buses, and most recently, free wireless access for the residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The governor of PA recently signed a law that makes city-sponsored, free wi-fi illegal. In this particular area (wifi), as well as others, the free market has failed, and so the government moved in to provide a better, cheaper solution (or even any solution).

The New York Times posted this interview with Pat Metheny. The conversation centers around the music that Pat feels most influenced him. Good stuff.

Wow, this guy is amazing. A genius explains is all about Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant. He's amazing with numbers, but unlike other savants, he's able to communicate how he thinks.

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.

This is the latest article showing that cell phones impair a driver's ability to concentrate and react ("Cell Phone Use Ages Young Drivers"). Some interesting highlights below...

A report from the University of Utah says when motorists between 18 and 25 talk on cell phones, they drive like elderly people moving and reacting more slowly and increasing their risk of accidents. "If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, his reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver," said David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor and principal author of the study. "It's like instant aging." And it doesn't matter whether the phone is hand-held or handsfree, he said. Any activity requiring a driver to "actively be part of a conversation" likely will impair driving abilities, Strayer said.

Motorists who talk on cell phones are more impaired than drunken drivers with blood-alcohol levels exceeding 0.08, according to research conducted in 2003. Strayer said they found that when 18- to-25-year-olds were placed in a driving simulator and talked on a cellular phone, they reacted to brake lights from a car in front of them as slowly as 65- to 74-year-olds who were not using a cell phone. The study found that drivers who talked on cell phones were 18 percent slower in braking and took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked.

The new research questions the effectiveness of cell phone usage laws in states such as New York and New Jersey, which only ban the use of hand-held cell phones while driving. It's not so much the handling of a phone, Strayer said, but the fact that having a conversation is a mental process that can drain concentration.

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I have absolutely no sympathy for this stupid jerk ("California Train Strikes an S.U.V.; At Least 11 Dead"). He decided he wanted to end his life, so he drove his suv onto the train tracks and waited. But as a train approached, filled with daily commuters, he quickly changed his mind and hopped out of the vehicle. He stood by and watched the oncoming southbound train derail, then hit the northbound train, ultimately killing 11 people (sadly, he was not among the dead) and injuring more than 100 others. It infuriates me when people do stupid shit like this. Wanna kill yourself? How about driving your suv into a ravine? Or into the Pacific? How about buying a handgun? It's just disgusting. 11 people are dead because of this loser.

Mac Observer posted a short article about a solar powered charging station for the iPod, built by Better Energy Systems. It weighs less than 6 ounces, is weatherproof, and will sell for $119. Aside from the price, it sounds like a really, really cool idea. You could take it camping with you and keep your tunes for as long as you like without electrified civilization.

I think a lot of people saw that this was a bad idea from the start, but Microsoft finally threw in the towel on Passport ("Microsoft revokes Passport service").

Germany's biggest ISP just launched a home DSL service for €3.99 per month ("DSL in Germany gets cheap and dirty"). Sure, there is a cap on monthly usage (2 gigabytes, which is pretty damn super for that price), but it's head and shoulders above the current offerings in the United States. Our home connection is a cable modem that costs us $30 per month. Hopefully, like many other trends that start in Europe and end up in the U.S., this one will make its way across the pond, too.

The folks at "Think Secret" think Apple is going to announce a $500 Mac computer in a few weeks. If true, this would be big news, and would hopefully get more folks using Apple products (something most people would be better off doing).

Just skimmed through "Prescription for Confusion" and "Vioxx. Celebrex. Now Aleve. What's a Patient to Think?". Reading about things like this makes me happy that I don't take any prescription drugs. And given my increasing distrust of the FDA and pharmaceutical companies in general, I hope I can continue to avoid any prescription drugs in the future.

A Re-Pet showed up several years ago as an idea in a movie, but pet cloning is now a commercially available service, thanks to Genetic Savings and Clone. And pet cloning isn't just for everyday folks, either... Hollywood folks want to clone a bunch of star animals now, too.

"For the first time, GSC can now offer commercial cat cloning with a very high standard of health and physical resemblance between genetic donor and clones, thanks to our new chromatin transfer (CT) technology. We've just produced the first two cloned kittens by CT, both of which are healthy and normal after being born June 10 and 12. The clones are genetic duplicates of Tahini (shown on the left), a 1-year-old female Bengal cat belonging to the 4-year-old son of GSC CEO Lou Hawthorne.

These two remarkable kittens -- Tabouli and Baba Ganoush -- finally put to rest the issue of resemblance between clones and their genetic donors. When performed by a skilled team using sufficiently advanced technology, clones resemble their donors to an uncanny degree -- just as predicted by GSC."

The following is the story behind the Graphing Calculator that shipped on millions of Macintoshes with the release of the PowerPC in 1994. The original story is posted at Pacific Tech's website, but their webserver is pretty much dead right now, thanks to a recent slashdotting.

Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

This is the latest news I've come across in answering the "are cell phones bad for you?" question ("Lab Tests Show Mobile-Phone Risk"). In short, the four-year German research study says, "yes". Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is working on The Internationl EMF Project, which will assess health and environmental effects of exposure to static and time varying electric and magnetic fields in the frequency range 0-300 GHz (this covers cell phones).

From "Lab Tests Show Mobile-Phone Risk":

The research project, which took four years and which was coordinated by the German research group Verum, studied the effect of radiation on human and animal cells in a laboratory.

After being exposed to electromagnetic fields that are typical for mobile phones, the cells showed a significant increase in single- and double-strand DNA breaks. The damage could not always be repaired by the cell. DNA carries the genetic material of an organism and its different cells.

"There was remaining damage for future generation of cells," said project leader Franz Adlkofer. This means the change had procreated. Mutated cells are seen as a possible cause of cancer.

The radiation used in the study was at levels between a specific absorption rate of between 0.3 and 2 watts per kilogram. Most phones emit radio signals at SAR levels of between 0.5 and 1 w/kg.

Adlkofer advised against the use of a mobile phone when an alternative fixed-line phone was available, and recommended the use of a headset connected to a cell phone whenever possible.

"We don't want to create a panic, but it is good to take precautions," he said, adding that additional research could take another four or five years.

None of the world's top six mobile-phone vendors could immediately respond to the results of the study.

Damn, I love it when respectable publications (such as the New York Times) dish it out against Microsoft for sucking as hard as they do. "The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)" is a super read.

Bruce Schneier, a well-respected authority on security issues, made the excellent observation, "It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools [such as Internet Explorer] with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault. Don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer, period."

So if you're a Windows user, do yourself a gigantic favor and get Firefox now.

Another milestone for Apple's iTunes Music Store... Apple iTunes sells 200m songs.

Well, it's a done deal. IBM sold its PC business to a company in China. IBM will receive a total of $1.25 billion, of which $650 million is in cash.

In what should come as no suprise to anyone, the United States continues to produce mediocrity through the public school system ("The New York Times > National >U.S. Students Fare Badly in International Survey of Math Skills"). According to a new international comparison of skills among 15-year-olds, the United States ranked 28th of 40 countries in math and 18th in reading. The U.S. was also cited as having one of the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education. The study was released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. One of the officials at the OECD said, "The gap between the best and worst performing countries has widened." The study also pointed out that while the Czech Republic spent only one third as much per student as the United States did, it was one of the top 10 performing nations in the study, while the United States performed below the average of the nations surveyed.

A bunch of Swedes gathered data on why cellphones break ("Cellphones get broken by tight jeans"). Here are the Top 10 most common reasons for "Mobile accidents":

1. Dropped the mobile on the ground.
2. Squeezed the cellphone in tight jeans/pockets.
3. Used the handset in the rain.
4. Throw the device on the ground in rage.
5. The dog/child got hold of the mobile.
6. Dropped the cellphone in the toilette.
7. Dropped the handset into the sea.
8. Forgot the cellphone on the roof of the car.
9. Perspiration on the mobile during workout.
10. Dropped the handset in the snow.

Here's an interesting article describing a new way to control traffic lights that's 30% more efficient than current methods.

Have you ever wished, as you sat at a red light, that you had the power to switch it to green? A traffic researcher is proposing that giving motorists precisely this power could improve the efficiency of city roads.

The catch (there had to be a catch) is that this control wouldn't be handed over to individual drivers. Instead they would exercise it collectively. If a large enough convoy of cars approached a red light, this would force the light to turn green, while the other lights at the junction turned red.

Read the rest of "Beating the lights"...

I recently watched Quiz Show since first seeing it about 9 years ago. Still a good movie, but what's possible now (that wasn't really possible in 1995) is a huge amount of available information on the internet.

I dug up a great set of videos, transcripts, and other stuff at PBS' website ("The Quiz Show Scandal"). Not only does much of the information support the factual nature of the movie Quiz Show, but there's also a lot of other interesting information there, too. For instance, Dr. Joyce Brothers gained her fame as a contestant on The $64,000 Challenge, one of the many rigged quiz shows in the 1950's (although she is noted as being one of the few contestants who did not willingly participate in the organized fraud).

Pamela Jones put together a nice snapshot of Microsoft ("Use Our Software or Somebody Might Get Hurt"), including quotations from Steve Ballmer telling various Asian goverments that "someday, somebody will come" after them.

The success of Wal-Mart should never be taken lightly, because it's no accident that they're good at when they do. This article ("What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits") touches on some of the practices that they use to stay ahead of the field. Impressive, thorough, intrusive, and scary all come to mind.

Here's a nice compilation from BBC News ("Bush win under world press spotlight") showing what the rest of the world thinks of Bush's re-election. Some are in support, many are not. I posted a few gems below...

Bush's election comes when the majority of people in the world said "no" to Bush, which will make the Atlantic chasm even deeper... The election outcome is a win for a conservative America... A liberal America, open to what Europe has to say, has lost. -- Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza

The American voters found the "danger" of gay marriages or the expansion of adoption more important than the soldiers being killed in Iraq. Mostly, the white conservatives of the American rural areas voted for the "tough cowboy from Texas". The youth vote in the port cities, the women, the Hispanics, the blacks were not sufficient for a change. Fear has won. The world has lost. -- Turkey's Milliyet

The battle is finally over. But a deeply divided nation remains... This is a problem very largely of Mr Bush's making, for American society is reaping what he has sown... His policies have deepened the rifts in American society. And by toughening his stance on the most divisive issues during the election campaign, the president has further split the nation. -- Hong Kong's South China Morning Post

Here are some interesting details about the famous "hot coffee" lawsuit against McDonald's from 1994. The public image is that the entire lawsuit was frivolous, but McDonald's had record of more than 700 claims from people burned by McDonald's coffee between 1982 and 1992, and McDonald's repeatedly ignored them. It hardly seems frivolous if one person finally decided to sue them.

Furthermore, the public perception is that some shallow, greedy lady decided to sue McDonald's so she could make a few million dollars, when in reality she was awarded $160,000 in compensatory damages (she had 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body, including her genitals) and $480,000 in punitive damages, and only decided to sue McDonald's Corp after they refused to cover her $20,000 in medical expenses.

I would sure as shit not want my privates burned (who would...), and squeezing half a million dollars out of a multi-billion dollar company hardly seems like a fair trade.

new term from trendwatching.com... life caching: collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse.

This is just super. After reading a study showing that warmer office environments are directly related to greater productivity in office workers, I came across an article ("Some Cold Employees May Never Find Relief") about most building thermostats being non-functional, merely present to make people feel better about being frozen/baked while sitting quietly at their office jobs.

HVAC experts acknowledge what millions of office workers have suspected all along: A lot of office thermostats are completely fake -- meant to dupe you into thinking you've altered the office weather conditions.

The specialists are unrepentant. Fed up with complaints from sweaty men and shivering women, HVAC technicians install dummy thermostats to give workers the illusion of control. In some leased buildings, even the corporate tenants don't know the thermostats are useless. Other times, it's the companies themselves, barraged with calls from workers, who ask the landlord's HVAC technicians to "fix" things.

Richard Dawson, an HVAC specialist from Homer, Ill., who has several landlord clients, says too many office workers feel their environment is "anything but what they want it to be." He estimates that 90% of office thermostats are dummies.

An ergonomics study at Cornell University ("Warm Offices Linked to Fewer Typing Errors and Higher Productivity") found that warm workers are more productive. They also concluded that it's about $2 less per employee per hour to maintain a higher office temperature (think high electricity bill). The office where I work is very often freezing. Most of us wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts, jackets, and sometimes hats... in addition to portable space heaters that we keep under or on top of our desks. Talk about a waste of resources...

"At 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the workers were keyboarding 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate, but at 68 degrees, their keying rate went down to 54 percent of the time with a 25 percent error rate," Hedge says. "Temperature is certainly a key variable that can impact performance."

Rolling Stone published an interesting article ("Wal-Mart Wants $10 CDs") about the current cost of music cds, and how Wal-Mart is flexing its muscles to drive costs down. Right now, Wal-Mart (and most retailers) buy cds for about $12, but unlike most of the retail world, Wal-Mart turns around and sells each cd to the public for $10 each, thereby eating a $2 loss per disc. Well, it looks like Wal-Mart is tired of eating the difference, and they've told the major record labels that they will no longer buy cds for $12 a piece anymore, so prices had better go down (with the not-so-subtle implication being that if the labels don't play nice, Wal-Mart will just stop carrying their products altogether, which will have very little impact on Wal-Mart, and a huge impact on the record companies). Much more detail in the article, and from the looks of it, I suspect that this is going to have a big impact on the music industry over the coming months. Keep your ears peeled...

Interesting factoid: the independent market-research firm Almighty Institute of Music Retail built this breakdown of where your money goes when you shell out $15.99 for a typical major-label release:

$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead

Here's a Wired article ("Hot Wheels") that's all about Smart cars. Lots of interesting details, including confirmation that we're still more than a year away from U.S. availability... phooey.

When George Bush ran for presidency in 2000, The Lone Star Iconoclast (a Republican newspaper in Bush's hometown of Crawford, Texas) endorsed him. In their own words, "The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised".

But after four years in office, his hometown newspaper wants him out. Not only that, but for 2004 they are endorsing Kerry instead of Bush. It's an interesting read, especially for current Bush supporters. It goes without saying that anti-Bush folks would vote against him, but it's interesting to see the converts (especially when they're from Bush's hometown).

Found this article ("Survey Says: Cell Phones Left Out") that discusses the increasing inaccuracy of polling and survey organizations, such as Gallup. I'm generally against polls and surveys, but I recognize that our society uses them in many ways (even if they're used to do all kinds of sneaky, tactical marketing and product placement).

Most polls take place over the telephone, but only over traditional land-lines. With more and more people opting for cell-phone-only life, the statistics and poll results are growing less and less representative of the actual population. Today, 3% of the U.S. population use a cell phone as their only phone, and over the next 5 years it may grow to 15%. Those numbers may sound small, but for a country of ~300 million people, 3% would amount to 9 million people, and 15% would be 45 million. That's gonna translate into a fairly huge discrepancy, and will usher in snapshots of society that are even more skewed and weird than they already are.

This is pretty interesting. "Dogs 'sniff out' bladder cancer" says that dogs have been proven to smell cancer in humans.

Dogs can be trained to sniff out bladder cancer, the first controlled experiments published claim. There have been anecdotal reports of dogs spotting cancer in their owners, but now researchers say they have proved this phenomenon scientifically. The scientists at Amersham Hospital, Buckinghamshire, ultimately hope to build a tool that is as good at discerning these smells as dogs' noses. Their findings appear in the British Medical Journal.

I've been curious about the differences between The Sims and the newly-released Sims 2, and this Wired article (" Face Lift of the Original") answers them pretty well.

From "The Secret Behind the iPod's Scrollwheel":

There are many reasons to like the iPod, but to me, the most compelling one is the scrollwheel. There's never been anything better for negotiating the prodigious amounts of music that we're lucky enough to be able to fit into our pockets these days. The scrollwheel has been through three iterations. The first one actually rotated; then there was the touch-sensitive one; and finally there's the clickable one found on the iPod Mini and fourth-generation iPod. I'd always assumed that this bit of design genius sprung from Apple's R&D labs, but, in fact, I discovered that a company called Synaptics, which primarily makes touchpads for laptops, actually designed this little piece of navigational heaven, in accordance with Apple's stringent design requirements.

Interesting article at the New York Times about working under pressure: "Cracking Under the Pressure? It's Just the Opposite, for Some"

John Taylor Gatto wrote The Underground History of American Education, which shows his inside view of the U.S. education system based on his 30 years experience. I haven't read the book yet, only